Good content is not enough anymore. Your articles have to be outstanding and must be much better than the one of your competitors. Don’t write just and useless articles just for the sake of publishing something new. Instead, concentrate on quality and make your content stand out from the crowd. The competition is increasing as we speak, and quality will be the only way to succeed.
You are giving some great advice to use for increasing readership and loyal followers. I am trying to include 2-3 sources from each of your list categories so that I have a balanced approach to increasing traffic. Right now I am learning Stumble Upon and Squido.com. Although I submit articles to Ezine, I think my keywords are not strong enough to get a good click through rate. I am getting better about writing articles with strong keywords now; sort of fell off the pace of that when I started using a lot of guest authors :( Thanks for your great insights and check list for increasing traffic, Brankica!
What an awesome stuff you're sharing here, Brankica. I'm a big fan of social networking site and blogging communities. Social Sites are great way to connect other bloggers and marketers. I've great success with blog commenting. I think it's another great way to connect with blog owner and build relationship. In the earlier days of my blogging, i did commenting just to get traffic but now i do commenting to build relationship with blog owner/connect with blog owner. Anyways, Thanks for sharing this great Post. Keep Rocking. Good Luck. ~Dev
Now that we have the data we want in the chart, we use the advanced search to filter it down to only the traffic we want to see. Click the blue “Advanced” link beside the search bar that is just to the top right of your list of landing pages. This will open the Advanced search screen, where we want to setup our query. In the green drop down, choose “Medium” and in the text box at the end of the row we type “organic”. Click the Apply button below the query builder to apply this search.

James, you give a great template for how a business needs to move forward in their chosen niche online. Quite informative and the meeting of minds has been something a number of us have done online and in person to gain better insight into our small similar businesses. Thank you for sharing your detailed approach to increasing organic traffic...content still is king.

For reasons we’ve already discussed, traffic from bookmarks and dark social is an enormously valuable segment to analyze. These are likely to be some of your most loyal and engaged users, and it’s not uncommon to see a notably higher conversion rate for a clean direct channel compared to the site average. You should make the effort to get to know them.

Brankica, Gooooood...ness! Where to start giving you props on this VERY well developed post. Absolutely brilliant. You have covered so much, so many areas and done it extremely well. Two items that grabbed me the most, as I have commented time and again about where I got my blogging start, and that is through freelance writing. So, I have always limited myself by using this form of media. Video / photo journalism are brilliant forms of communication, but I've always said, "Ah, that's for someone else..." And I noticed that you lightly touched on e-zines (article submissions). These will become viable again as they make adjustments. Anyway, I could go on forever. Again, you have done a fantastic job with this post. All the best, Bryan
When you run a PPC campaign -- whether through Google or some other PPC provider -- you can track how much site traffic it drives in this part of your sources report. Obviously for proper PPC campaign management , you'll also need to be reviewing whether that traffic actually converts , too. Like email marketing as a source, be sure to include tracking tokens with all of your paid search campaigns so this is properly bucketed as, you know, paid search.
However, this may not be the case for your company or your clients. You may start by looking at keyword rankings, and realize that you’re no longer ranking on the first page for ten of your core keywords. If that’s the case, you quickly discovered your issue, and your game plan should be investing in your core pages to help get them ranking again for these core keywords.
We are in the SEO industry for a while now, wearing many hats: digital marketers, tool developers, advisers, researchers, copywriters, etc. But first of all, we are, just like you, site owners. And we’ve been through ups and downs regarding organic traffic, and we were in the situation of trying to understand why the Google traffic dropped dramatically at some point as well. Having all these in mind, we’ve thought of easing your work, and we’ve put together a list with the top 16 reasons that can cause sudden traffic drop, unrelated to Google algorithm changes or penalties.
There’s also other search engines. Ask, Dogpile, IxQuick, and so forth; these are all minor. However, one search engine seems to be gaining market share and exposure, and that’s DuckDuckGo. It has been trending in the wake of Google privacy concerns and some clever marketing from the DDG staff. It’s something you should, at least, pay some attention to.
Organic search traffic used to just mean the amount of traffic that came to your site via someone who found your site using a search engine. Then, you could drill down into more detail to see which keyword they searched to get to your website. For example, we might learn that someone came to HubSpot.com by searching the keyword phrase "inbound marketing." This is important to know because it helps businesses understand which keywords are driving the most traffic, leads, and customers so they can develop better-informed content and keyword strategies.
Hey Michael, thanks so much for the comment. After this post, I decided to revamp my traffic generation strategy and work more on the existing sources and work a bit more on the ones I was not using that much. I saw results almost from the first day. This list is good because of the diversity of the ideas, cause if one thing doesn't work for you, there has to be another one that will sky rocket your stats :)
Relying too much on one source of traffic is a risky strategy. A particular channel or strategy can be fantastic for generating traffic today, but it doesn’t mean it will stay the same tomorrow. Some sites lost out when Penguin started penalizing on certain SEO linking practices. Others lost out when Facebook decided to massively restrict organic reach. If your site relies exclusively on only one source of traffic, then algorithm changes can create some serious trouble for you. So be aware of the importance of diversifying and know the options available from different traffic sources.
To do this, I often align the launch of my content with a couple of guest posts on relevant websites to drive a load of relevant traffic to it, as well as some relevant links. This has a knock-on effect toward the organic amplification of the content and means that you at least have something to show for the content (in terms of ROI) if it doesn't do as well as you expect organically.
Hey Mavis, thanks for that :) I wrote down all the ideas from the comments as well so there are at least 65 ideas now, lol. I just wish we all had more time in a day to really work on all of them. I guess all that testing and tracking comes now so we can focus on the best for our blogs. But do I even need to say how much I hate testing and tracking.
Amber Kemmis is the VP of Client Services at SmartBug Media. Having a psychology background in the marketing world has its perks, especially with inbound marketing. My past studies in human behavior and psychology have led me to strongly believe that traditional ad marketing only turns prospects away, and advertising spend never puts the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Thus, resulting in wasted marketing efforts and investment. I'm determined to help each and every one of our clients attract and retain new customers in a delightful and helpful way that leads to sustainable revenue growth. Read more articles by Amber Kemmis.